Robot City

South Korea plans to build a whole city from scratch dedicated to the robotics industry.

SciFi.com reports that the appropriately named Robot Land will “have all sorts of facilities for the research, development, and production of robots, as well as things like exhibition halls and even a stadium for robot-on-robot competitions. The $530 million project should get underway sometime in 2009.”

Korea.net adds that the city’s industrial output will have an “emphasis on so-called service robots that can clean homes and provide entertainment.”

Now we just have to wait till the city secedes from South Korea; it then achieves a kind of limited national sovereignty; it seats a robot-ambassador at the UN; its Artificially Intelligent offspring form a Parliament, or a Ministry of War; they manufacture cannons and other violent forms of propulsive enginery, filling the sky with drones; and then human history becomes interesting again.

Basically, it’s a new city built from the ground up which will have the most highly advanced technology deeply ingrained into its every facet, bringing as yet unheard of connectivity and communication infrastructure to residents.

Shades of 01, the Palestine of machine intelligences — the only cool concept to come out of the Matrix franchise after the first film. Geoff, if you’ve never seen the two-part anime (“The Second Renaissance”) that covers the rise of 01 like a news story, I can show it to you. It’s one of my favorite pieces of recent sci-fi.

Hey Geoff, I know you’re interested in Gordon Matta-Clark, but have you seen Jiri Kolar’s structural reconfiguration collages? They’re not mind-blowing, but I have a few up at my site and I thought they might intrigue you.